20 Popular Social Media Sites Right Now

Social media networks are a major resource for both small and big businesses that are looking to promote their brands on the Internet. The platforms are easy to use and some of them even have paid advertising options for businesses that want to reach new audiences. However, just because your business needs to be on these platforms doesn’t mean that it has to be on every other social media site. To properly utilize the power of social media you need to know the most popular social media sites and identify the ones that work best for your business to avoid spreading yourself too thin.

To make this easy for you, we profiled 20 most popular social media websites so you can now make informed marketing decisions.

Popular Social Media Sites in 2016

Facebook

This is the biggest social media network on the Internet, both in terms of total number of users and name recognition. Founded on February 4, 2004, Facebook has within 12 years managed to accumulate more than 1.59 billion monthly active users and this automatically makes it one of the best mediums for connecting people from all over the world with your business. It is estimated that more than 1 million small and medium-sized businesses use the platform to advertise their business.

Twitter

You might be thinking that limiting your posts to 140 characters is no way to advertise your business, but you will be shocked to know that this social media platform has more than 320 million active monthly users who make use of the 140 character limit to pass on information. Businesses can use Twitter to interact with prospective clients, answer questions, release latest news and at the same time use the targeted ads with specific audiences. Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006, and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California.

LinkedIn

Founded on December 14, 2002, and launched 0n May 5, 2003, LinkedIn is hands-down the most popular social media site for professional networking. The website is available in 24 languages and has over 400 million registered users. LinkedIn is great for people looking to connect with people in similar industries, networking with local professionals and displaying business related information and statistics.

Google+

While it’s no Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, Google+ has its place among the popular social media sites. Its SEO value alone makes it a must-use tool for any small business. Launched on December 15, 2011, Google+ has joined the big leagues registering 418 active million users as of December 2015.

YouTube

YouTube — the largest and most popular video-based social media website — was founded on February 14, 2005, by three former PayPal employees. It was later bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube has over 1 billion website visitors per month and is the second most popular search engine behind Google.

Pinterest

Launched in March 2010, Pinterest is a relatively newcomer in the social media arena. This platform consists of digital bulletin boards where businesses can pin their content. Pinterest announced September 2015 that it had acquired 100 million users. Small businesses whose target audience is mostly made up of women should definitely invest in Pinterest as more than half of its visitors are women.

Instagram

Like Pinterest, Instagram is a visual social media platform. The site, launched on October 6, 2010, has more than 400 million active users and is owned by Facebook. Many of its users use it to post information about travel, fashion, food, art and similar subjects. The platform is also distinguished by its unique filters together with video and photo editing features. Almost 95 percent of Instagram users also use Facebook.

Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the most difficult to use social networking platforms, but it’s also one of the most interesting sites. The platform allows several different post formats, including quote posts, chat posts, video and photo posts as well as audio posts, so you are never limited in the type of content that you can share. Like Twitter, reblogging, which is more like retweeting, is quick and easy. The social networking website was founded by David Karp in February 2007 and currently hosts more than 200 million blogs.

Flickr

Flickr, pronounced “Flicker,” is an online image and video hosting platform that was created by the then Vancouver-based Ludicorp on February 10, 2004, and later acquired by Yahoo in 2005. The platform is popular with users who share and embed photographs. As of October last year, Flickr had more than 112 million users and had its footprint in more than 63 countries. An average of a million photos are shared daily on Flickr.

Reddit

This is a social news and entertainment networking website where registered users can submit content such as direct links and text posts. Users are also able to organize and determine their position on the site’s pages by voting submissions up or down. Submissions with the most positive votes appear in the top category or main page. Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman on June 23, 2005. A decade later, the site boasts more than 36 million registered accounts and 231 million monthly visitors.

Snapchat

Snapchat is an image messaging application software product that was created by Reggie Brown, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy when they were students at Stanford University. The app was officially released in September 2011, and within a short span of time they have grown immensely registering an average of 100 million daily active users as of May 2015. More than 18 percent of all social media users use Snapchat.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform instant messaging client for smartphones, PCs and tablets. The app relies on the Internet to send images, texts, documents, audio and video messages to other users that have the app installed on their devices. Launched in January 2010, WhatsApp Inc. was acquired by Facebook on February 19, 2004, for about $19.3 billion. Today, more than 1 billion people use the service to communicate with their friends, loved ones and even customers.

Quora

Capitalizing upon human curiosity is an ingenious idea that would lead to the creation and launch of Quora in June, 2009. The website, co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo now claims that it received more than 80 million monthly unique visitors, with half of them coming from the U.S. So far, the question-and-answer website has managed to raise $141 in venture capital funds and while it doesn’t look ready to go public yet, it’s definitely a company to watch.

Vine

With over 40 million users, Vine is a rapidly growing video sharing social media app that allows users to share 6-second video clips with their followers. While this looks like a really short time for a video, businesses of all sizes are having tremendous success using the service. Vine was founded in June 2012 and later acquired by Twitter in October 2012, just before its official launch.

Periscope

Periscope is a live video streaming mobile app that was developed by Joe Bernstein and Kayvon Beykpour. The two started the company in February 2014 and later sold it to Twitter for $100 million in March 2015. Four months after its March 2015 relaunch, Periscope said that it had surpassed 10 million accounts and in December the same year, Apple announced Periscope as the app of the year.

BizSugar

BizSugar is a social networking platform and niche resource for small business owners, entrepreneurs and managers. The site was created in 2007 by DBH Communications, Inc., a provider of award-winning business publications, and later acquired by Small Business Trends LLC, in 2009. The platform allows users to share videos, articles, blog posts, podcast among other content. It also allows users to view and vote on submissions by other members.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends content for its users. More than 25 million people use StumbleUpon for entertainment and information. In addition, more than 80,000 publishers, brands, and other marketers have used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery platform to promote their businesses. StumbleUpon was owned by eBay from May 2007 to April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. It is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again.

Delicious

This is a social bookmarking web service for discovering, storing and sharing web bookmarks. The site was founded by Peter Gadjokov and Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired in 2005 by Yahoo. By the end of 2008, Delicious claimed that it had bookmarked 180 million URLs and acquired more than 5.3 million users. The service was later sold to AVOS Systems in April 2011 who later sold it to Science Inc. In January this year, Delicious Media said that it had acquired the service.

Digg

Founded more than a decade ago (November 2004), Digg is a news aggregator with a curated front page that selects stories specifically for the Internet audience, The topics vary widely from trending political issues to science to viral Internet issues and anything in between. Digg supports sharing of content to other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In 2015, the company claimed that it had about 11 million active monthly users.

Viber

Viber is a Voice over IP (VoIP) and instant messaging app for mobile devices that was developed and released by Viber Media on December 2, 2010. The app also allows for the exchange of audio, video and images between users. As of April 2014, Viber had accrued close to 600 million registered users and 230 monthly active users.

Which social media site is your favorite? Do you have one to add to our popular social media sites list?

Editor's Picks

Antony Maina is a Staff Writer for Small Business Trends. His beat includes social media, general business reporting and exploring how people relate to technology. With a background in freelance writing, he is a contributor to other tech websites and can be found at Word4Bloggers.

Before most other social networks even existed, StumbleUpon was my favorite. Early on, they had a page for each keyword phrase that showed all the best content ever shared about that subject and ranked the top people sharing on that topic. I suggested they monetize those pages and give AdWords a run for their money.

Instead, they made them impossible to find and focus on their traffic for pennies that bounces so badly that it is hard to know whether having content go viral on StumbleUpon is even beneficial. Because of the high bounce rate and low time on site, getting traffic from SU could cause you to lose SEO rankings and get lower traffic overall.

I have asked SEOs many times to find out whether we even want traffic from StumbleUpon anymore. No answers so far, but wouldn’t it be sad to invest time on a social network that actually cost you more traffic (from organic SEO), than the value of the bouncing traffic they send?

Hello, Antony!
Social media is the most powerful tool in today’s digital world. Without social media, it is not possible for businesses to promote their brand and reach out globally. There are numbers of social media platforms on which you can promote your brand, but not all have the same value. Thank you for the awesome list of most popular social media websites. We have to focus only on such social media that are relevant to our niche.

Interesting list. We don’t use Digg or Delicious or even Flickr nearly as much anymore. You have all the most-used on the list. I had not heard of Viber before.

You might be interested to know that YouKu, Weibo, and RenRen are Chinese versions of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Brands who wish to reach the Asian market should be aware that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China. This is why MavSocial provides reach for that audience through YouKu, Weibo, and RenRen – but only in their Enterprise version.

These three social networks were visible in their early versions, prompting me to ask. That is where I got this information – from MavSocial directly.

There are a few there that I have never used. In Australia most people are on Facebook. Maybe Twitter and snapchat for the younger generation. I do wonder what will be next though. Maybe people will get sick of Facebook adds and move to the next big thing.

We focus on educating our Clients about the importance of social media for their overall marketing strategy. Having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is imperative for businesses as it assists with their social proofing. Before trying a new product or service, most people will check out a business’ website and social media to determine their credibility.

Youtube is better than periscope, it’s much more user friendly, also it’s been around for much longer. I know other people are coming along trying to create a better YouTube, but in my opinion that just won’t happen. YouTube was created in 2005, and from then it’s exploded into our lives. It has over a billion users and almost a third of people who use the Internet each day. So I don’t understand what’s the point in using websites like YouTube, when you have YouTube. Everyone I know uses YouTube once a week at least, think about a billion other people using it once a week at least. The amount of people using it and the amount of views videos will get would be incredible. My point is stick to YouTube.

If you are like me, I had no time to create my own content social media. Do your research before you spend money online marketing or you can become a victim. I got scammed! I wanted to share my story and hopefully it will help someone like myself avoid the same mistakes and save money in the process. So i was recommended to a local online marketing company by a friend. Due to my lack of knowledge with the online realm, I trusted that the local marketing comapany knew what they were doing and promising. Then it started. Billing me $2k month for their so called marketing static package. What they failed to disclose was that their “static” packages were bascially just posting images on my social media accounts and growing a few followers a month. They said “It takes time” to get traffic. Which was total bs because they had no idea what they were doing. All they kept sending me was monthly reports with no sales. My contract was already 6 months into it but how could I get out? My friend told me about Odditly (google them). I reached out to odditly and asked them if they could help me! Odditly isn’t a marketing company. They are a auditing firm. They are like the sheriffs of online marketing. After I hired odditly to look over the contracts with the local marketing company, they discovered i wasn’t getting what I was paying for. There was a breach of contract hence I was able to cancel my contract and even got a few hundred refunded! Moral of the story, just do your research and due diligence prior to blowing all your money on a company who have nothing but fake promises.

This is a great post regarding social media sites. Finding good ones for content purposes is hard. I was already using some of the social media sites you mention. I didnt know about of few of them. Thanks for the insite.

The list is quite true and impressive. But considering the use of each social media platform i think the list should be reduced to ten. Youtube should have at least been in the first three taking a look at its usage. iTunes was also not included in the list.

I just read your article out of pure curiosity….I was thinking about how things change. It seems like Facebook is still super popular. Most people I know check in at least once a day, even if just for a few minutes.
My daughter is 14, and it’s funny because she is all about snapchat and Instagram , and lately, vine–all her friends are too. She says “Facebook is for old people” lol so, I’m 42 and I guess that qualifies me as an ‘old person’ toa teenager.
I also asked her yesterday if she ever reads a blog, and she sai “what’s a blog?” :-/
Thanks,
I appreciated the article

I believe Facebook wont be easily dislodged as teenagers might think for the fact that it had integrated itself so much itself in so many ways with internet that it ceases to be just a social media platform.

Interesting article. You have shared a big collection of social networking sites. All these sites are really important for us. We mostly know facebook, twitter, google plus, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram. But there are some other awesome social networking sites are available for us. We should use these sites to increase our social connections. Thanks for sharing with us.

Thank you! I liked the way you worded this information so even a newbie can understand the process. Great information looking forward to more of the same. It’s really an inspirational one!! But hard work is also a requirement.

I have read out some of the best articles at creativedreamtech.com, In these articles the author describes each and every point but I don’t understand completely. What a super, empowering and wise post to kick the year off.

Today I found your article on google because I am searching for new social media sites for my business and here I found five new social media sites on your list. Thanks for sharing this great article. If you don’t mind, you can also add Flipboard.com on your list, this is also a great social media site.

You are right Sanjeev Kumar. Today i searched top social media sites on google and this website on top. And I choose this link and follow all social media links to create me business profile. I am very thankful to save my time in searching lots of links.

It is increasingly becoming important for small business, as well as big business to be active on these social media platforms. Until recently, we were focussing mainly on Google+, Facebook and Twitter, but I understand there is a need to be live on all platforms available at our disposal today. Thank you for posting this list. Was really helpful.

With so many social networks out there I wonder if adding profiles to all of them would increase site traffic. We have a website that helps network marketers to increase downline growth at mlmrc.com and we’re constantly trying to figure out new ways to build traffic. My guess though is that these large social networks already get most of the social noise. So would the smaller one’s even be worth taking the time to create profiles on or not? If anyones knows let me know. Thanks.

Amazingly some well structured social media platforms remain underground, tellBin.in is an example, I bet many of you reading don’t really know about them. I was amazed at their content when I visited.

Social Media is the next big marketing giant, be it Twitter for Business, a product review at Periscope (though not everyone knows about it) or a successful ad campaign on the Facebook with a tremendous reach to the potential clients. Of all, Facebook is my best bet as it has directly favored my test tube business with a mere $500 ad campaign with $5000 increase in profits.

Thanks for this article. There are some of them i’ve not heard about since i started using the internet. I think I was only limited to facebook and Whatsapp. Now i can meet new people on some of these social network. Thanks once again.

Hmm, the very good list you added in your article and it’s not a small list. All media site is very useful but Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin and Youtube most of popular site. Thanks for you sharing.

I’m doing a research over SMM tools and found this article. Have you heard about eClincher? That’s what I’m using right now and I think you should totally give it a look. It combines Hootsuite, Sprout and Buffer functionalities, it’s quite a great tool. I was hoping to get your thoughts on it. I’ll stay tuned!

These are so far the best Social networking sites that you can use for any kind of purpose like meet up & for business purpose as well.My 3 favorites are Reddit,Flickr and Notcy( which is not in this list).

The leading social media sites or networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political or economic borders. That’s why the social sites are emerging and getting popularity in our society. Thanks for sharing these great ideas.

A really comprehensive list and interesting read. It will be interesting to see how this digital landscape evolves, particularly for businesses operating online. I think the rise of messenging apps, such as FB messenger, and the use of bots to automate conversations with prospects and customers is adding a new dimension to digital marketing and will be an area to keenly watch, study and explore, over the next 12 months.

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